Is Game of Thrones the Reason All Your Favorite TV Characters Are Dying?

It’s been a particularly brutal couple of weeks for television viewers. The Good Wife lost a major, beloved character, The Walking Dead crossed a narrative line, Scandal bumped off its only Emmy award-winning actor, Justified put a beloved character in jeopardy and, for God’s sake, Nick and Jess broke up on New Girl. I don’t watch Teen Wolf, but there was huge uproar from its fan community over the death of a major character this week. What is going on? What did we do, as fans, to deserve such a bloodbath? I think the answer is pretty clear: we loved Game of Thrones.

George R.R. Martin, who wrote the books adapted for the hit HBO show, not the first to callously kill the characters you’ve come to love. The bloodthirsty Joss Whedon has held that crown since the 90s. But there’s no denying that the death of Ned Stark, near the end of Game of Thrones’ first season, changed television in a big way. At the time, thanks to his film career and Lord of the Rings associations, actor Sean Bean was by far the most famous person in the Game of Thrones cast. His character, Ned Stark, was also our trademark hero. The one man fighting the good fight for honor in a corrupt world. But that’s a story we’ve seen a million times, and it’s not the one George R.R. Martin was interested in telling. It’s also part of the reason why the Game of Thrones TV fandom picked up so much steam after Season 1. Word of mouth spread. You can’t miss this show, it breaks all the rules.

What are those rules? Oh, you know, the old TV rules that say you can’t kill off your hero. It’s why Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse couldn’t kill off Jack in episode one of Lost like they intended. ABC executives nixed the idea as too controversial. It’s hard to imagine them making that same call in a post-Game of Thrones world. Just in the past two weeks, we had two major death scenes that viewers and writers alike couldn’t help but compare to last season’s Game of Thrones bloodbath, the “Red Wedding.” On The Walking Dead, a show that has dealt in the death of major characters from the start, the victims two weeks ago were little girls. And one of those little girls was a killer herself. The Walking Dead is based on comics written before Game of Thrones’ success on HBO, so we can’t accuse the show-runners of cooking up the idea just to grab at some of that Game of Thrones shocker cache. But we can assume that the executives who signed off on the Lizzie and Mika double-murder episode could ease their concerns of “have we gone too far?” by thinking of the brutal stabbing of a pregnant woman on Game of Thrones.

The other major TV death this week, however, is a clear case of the show-runners chasing that Red Wedding shock value. The departure of Will Gardner on The Good Wife was inevitable when actor Josh Charles decided he no longer wanted to be on the show. The show-runners had half a season to figure out how they were going to get rid of this character. They admit they considered options other than the brutal courthouse shooting they ultimately went with. They said, “[Will] could get disbarred or run off to Borneo to do good works. But it didn’t do much for us dramatically. It was the softer blow, but at a certain point the show wasn’t looking for the softer blow.” Charles himself said that he preferred this ending for his character because it had “the element of surprise. The shock.” But, truth be told, Will’s death doesn’t make sense in the context of this world, and the writing didn’t make an effort to make it make sense. In fact, the show made an extra effort to hide what was coming. Was that all in the service of wringing that extra Game of Thrones-esque despair from us?

Shows have been getting more brutal for years before this recent bloody week, and sometimes to great narrative effect. I like to think that Game of Thrones treatment of Ned Stark emboldened Homeland to kill off its male lead, Nicholas Brody. That was a bold and highly necessary move; to keep his love story with Carrie viable, the show had lost much of the vim from Season 1. The same trick was played this season with House of Cards, to a less effective end; it didn’t have quite the same mojo after Frank Underwood threw Zoe Barnes in front of that train.

There are recent deaths that felt right, and earned. Both Hank Schrader and Walter White earned their grisly ends on Breaking Bad. But for every earned death, there’s a stunt shooting that seems calculated to engender just shock. Both Art’s recent shooting on Justified and James’s death on Scandal lacked the appropriate emotional resonance that should accompany such a stunt.

How will these affect your favorite shows in the future? At some point will we grow emotionally fatigued and numb if show-runners just keep chasing shock after shock? Surely no one is watching Downton Abbey anymore with any kind of expectation that a character they love will make it through safely. It’s gotten to the point where our paranoia about crushing TV deaths have bled into our sitcoms. We’ve been chasing our tails for the last few weeks over whether or not the titular mother on How I Met Your Mother is going to die in the finale. At this point, all Bays and Thomas have to do to make us happy with the finale is keep that one character alive. But it’s undeniable that this more unpredictable approach toward storytelling can result in better, stronger television. No need to keep weak characters in rotation. No need to string along floundering plots. But when death exists as merely a gimmick (as it did in the premieres for both Sleepy Hollow and The Following), how can we feel invested? Anyone can die, but that doesn’t mean that everyone should.